Family Location Research Articles

Dynamics of social norms in the city

We study how in a city either opposite social norms remain or a particular code of behavior spreads and ultimately prevails. We develop a multicommunity model with overlapping generations. When young, an individual chooses a certain level of educational effort. The crucial feature is that the decision is influenced by peers living in the area who favor a social norm either valuing education or discrediting it. As an adult, an individual who cares about both her offspring's expected income and the social norm, chooses the family's location. Endogenous location leads to different patterns of social norms in the city. We identify two types of urban equilibrium: a culturally-balanced city where social norms are distributed evenly among urban areas and where the rate of education is the same in each urban area and a culturally-divided city where urban areas oppose on their prevailing social norm and exhibit different rates of education. We then study the dynamics of social norms. We show that there are multiple long-run patterns of social norms. A particular steady state is achieved depending on the initial distribution support for social norms in the population. Finally, we show that a public policy promoting social integration can lead, in the long run, to a population unanimously discrediting education. Enforcing social integration can obtain less education than allowing the culturally-divided city to arise.

Early Environment and Neurobehavioral Development Predict Adult Temperament Clusters

BackgroundInvestigation of the environmental influences on human behavioral phenotypes is important for our understanding of the causation of psychiatric disorders. However, there are complexities associated with the assessment of environmental influences on behavior.Methods/Principal FindingsWe conducted a series of analyses using a prospective, longitudinal study of a nationally representative birth cohort from Finland (the Northern Finland 1966 Birth Cohort). Participants included a total of 3,761 male and female cohort members who were living in Finland at the age of 16 years and who had complete temperament scores. Our initial analyses (Wessman et al., in press) provide evidence in support of four stable and robust temperament clusters. Using these temperament clusters, as well as independent temperament dimensions for comparison, we conducted a data-driven analysis to assess the influence of a broad set of life course measures, assessed pre-natally, in infancy, and during adolescence, on adult temperament.ResultsMeasures of early environment, neurobehavioral development, and adolescent behavior significantly predict adult temperament, classified by both cluster membership and temperament dimensions. Specifically, our results suggest that a relatively consistent set of life course measures are associated with adult temperament profiles, including maternal education, characteristics of the family’s location and residence, adolescent academic performance, and adolescent smoking.ConclusionsOur finding that a consistent set of life course measures predict temperament clusters indicate that these clusters represent distinct developmental temperament trajectories and that information about a subset of life course measures has implications for adult health outcomes.

A Contextual Analysis of Gender Disparity in Education in India: The Relative Effects of Son Preference, Women's Status, and Community

Multi-level analyses of data on 18,519 families with opposite sex children from NFHS-3 are used to test the impact of maternal son preference and context on the gender differential in education in India. The results show that girls are at a greater educational disadvantage compared to their brothers in families with maternal son preference. Mother's education is shown to reduce the effect of son preference and to reduce the bias against daughters. Additionally, there is more gender inequality in education in communities with high levels of maternal son preference and low women's status. Importantly, a family's location in a community or region with higher women's status explains much of the effect of maternal son preference on the gender disparity. The importance of context is further solidified by significant interaction effects showing that the negative effect of mother's education is modified by context.

Improving Follow-up to Newborn Hearing Screening: A Learning-Collaborative Experience

Although approximately 95% of US newborns are now screened for hearing loss at birth, more than half of those who do not pass the screen lack a documented diagnosis. In an effort to improve the quality of the follow-up process, teams from 8 states participated in a breakthrough-series learning collaborative. Teams were trained in the Model for Improvement, a quality-improvement approach that entails setting clear aims, tracking results, identifying proven or promising change strategies, and the use of small-scale, rapid-cycle plan-do-study-act tests of these changes. Parents acted as equal partners with professionals in guiding system improvement. Teams identified promising change strategies including ensuring the correct identification of the primary care provider before discharge from the birthing hospital; obtaining a second contact number for each family before discharge; "scripting" the message given to families when an infant does not pass the initial screening test; and using a "roadmap for families" as a joint communication tool between parents and professionals to demonstrate each family's location on the "diagnostic journey." A learning-collaborative approach to quality improvement can be applied at a state-system level. Participants reported that the collaborative experience allowed them to move beyond a focus on improving their own service to improving connections between services and viewing themselves as part of a larger system of care. Ongoing quality-improvement efforts will require refinement of measures used to assess improvement, development of valid indicators of system performance, and an active role for families at all levels of system improvement.

The Virgin of Guadalupe and the Economics of Symbolic Behavior

The Virgin of Guadalupe is a well-known religious symbol honored throughout the Americas but especially in Mexico. This article focuses on the celebration of the feast of Guadalupe in a village in Sonora, Mexico. The region where the village is located has been developed agriculturally by the Mexican government and is now economically quite modern. The development program has had ethnic ramifications as well: where once two distinct ethnic groups existed there is now a cultural continuum. The Guadalupe fiesta in this case is a forum for the expression of a family's location on this continuum, and a means for socially validating changes in this status. The Guadalupe ceremonies also elicit ethnic allegiances in a community where ethnic cleavages exist but are rarely brought out. Through participating in specific ways in the various ritual dramas of the feast, individuals illustrate this cleavage and then overcome it by avowing the Virgin's protection of all Mexicans without regard to ethnic categories. This case has implications for the theoretical considerations of the relationship between economic change and ethnic identity, as well as for the role of individuals and symbolic expression in the context of social change.